Entanglements
Quick note to readers: I’ve added a contributing-subscription option to Leeway. I say “option” because I am not putting Leeway behind a paywall. All subscribers will continue to receive the semi-monthly installment and have full access to the archive. Substack does not offer a “donate” feature; for any of you who’d like to contribute something to this effort, you can subscribe monthly or yearly, and cancel that whenever you want. If you already have, thank you. Really.
I have also launched a Leeway Audio Essays Series of longer, more in-depth pieces on maritime technological history, as audio recordings. These are available to contributing subscribers; they require considerably more investment on my part to make. The first two episodes are already posted. The third should have gone out last Sunday, 14 January.
In the previous piece “We Are Internal,” I used the example of the Crabtree watercraft models to illustrate the point that it does us little good to consider any artefact—anything we have made—apart from its full context. Even purely aesthetic appreciation depends to some extent on the ability to appreciate what the thing is for—what it does—and that is difficult without any context whatsoever. I suspect that the Crabtree exhibit works because most humans viewing it, even very young ones, know that these are waterborne vehicles; they are for carrying people and their stuff across water. I also suspect that, if they did not know that, most of them would probably view the models with curiosity, but without as much aesthetic appreciation.
So, there is some implied or assumed context for the models, and that contributes to their appreciation.
There is another way to consider the context of an artefact, and that is as a set of causes and effects, consequences both intended and unintended, and as nodes of networks consisting of other artefacts, humans, naturally-occurring objects, and other creatures. This approach is less interested in understanding the artefact itself and more interested in understanding where its immediate context leads, in all directions.
Archaeologist Ian Hodder, in Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things, explores the relationship between humans and the things we make through the entire span of our existence as a species. Hodder views the complex relationship between us and our stuff as “entanglements.” He argues that human evolution, since the beginning of our propensity for making things, has been directional, thanks to these entanglements. The entanglements occur because the things we make to solve problems have unintended consequences out of which other problems arise, for which we come up with new things to solve, and this process grows ever more complex. It also becomes ever more difficult to escape, as a way of existence.
Dystopian visions are much easier to conjure than those of a future more like our present reality—which of course exists between dystopia and utopia—but there are those who specialize in doing just that, and they are important voices right now, given the fact that, as Hodder puts it, “we cannot just keep doing what we have always done.” A common dystopia in our own society is one in which things we make—specifically, artificial intelligence—become too successful for us to control, and take over our world, stripping us of our power over it. This of course is the latest iteration of the Prometheus myth, of stealing fire from the gods, of creating Frankenstein’s monster. In the Hebrew tradition, it was the eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, as I like to mention, as I find it such an insightful metaphor for the core human dilemma. In all cases, it is about reaching too far; attempting to expropriate the prerogatives of the gods for ourselves means attempting to do something we are capable of doing but incapable of doing right. Because we do not do a very good job of analyzing and anticipating the likely consequences of our actions in advance, we feed the understandable fear that our brains, as good as they are, are “not good enough to solve the problems we create.”
We have come so far in our interdependence with things (and things are not passive here; we serve things as much as they serve us) that it does not require hubris to make decisions about things that have unintended consequences. Even when we mean well, the consequences of our actions can cause or contribute to something harmful, without our being aware of it. This is the central problem at the heart of the wonderful TV sitcom The Good Place, created by Michael Schur after extensive engagement with ethical philosophers (many of whom make cameos in the series, which is delightful). Making ethical decisions correctly requires knowing much more than we usually do about the consequences of those decisions, because we are so entangled with things and other people all over the world. The answer, though, is not to condemn humanity to hell; it’s to invest time and effort in knowing more about these entanglements, and how we get into them, and how we can alter them.
To Hodder, our problem is not that we make things. Our things have made life so much better—for some of us. But, our entanglements with them have also, as he convincingly argues, made inequality worse and more entrenched, and put us in the ecological crisis we are now grappling with. The solution, he concludes, is to get better at analyzing our use of things, considering the long-term consequences of them as well as the short-term benefits, which we are not in the habit of doing, and are not encouraged to do in a consumer society dominated by corporate capitalism (which itself is dominated by the drive for short-term profits). He does not advocate returning to some point in the past that was less entangled with fewer things than we are; in fact, he spends much of the book arguing why that is almost impossible. Neither, however, does his argument support the dystopian determinism that would have us believe that we are inevitably heading toward the world of The Matrix. (Side note: understanding that movie as metaphorical above all else makes it much more meaningful.) There is nothing stopping us from being “technological” while at the same time being equally mindful of how to live both well and sustainably on this planet—which we in “the Western world” have never attempted to do before. And we created the world of capitalism, technological development almost for its own sake, and open-ended economic “growth” within which everyone must compete for resources and wealth.
How to do better? In general, by understanding our own technological history, and the entanglements it has produced, much more fully than we have. That starts with thinking about them—thinking about where they came from, and why, and what intended and unintended consequences they have. Knowing where our t-shirts come from matters, to use one of Hodder’s examples. The things we use, unlike Crabtree models, do not float in suspended isolation.
Another example Hodder employs is a timely one indeed—electric vehicles, or EVs. The pros and cons of EVs versus today’s efficient ICEs (internal combustion engines) are far more complicated than the mere fact that one burns gas and produces carbon emissions while the other does not. Many of us have thought about this particular issue, and considered issues such as what our power plants are powered by, what the human and ecological costs of lithium mining are, and other entanglements in which EVs are situated. This is good practice for applying such thinking more broadly in our lives. I’m not saying that everyone has the time and brain space to consider these things in full depth, just as I wouldn’t say people should be their own doctors or software developers when they don’t possess those skill sets. But it does behoove us to understand as much as we can about our own health, and our daily lives are easier if we are adept at using whatever software we work with. So, there is always a “layman’s knowledge” that is worth acquiring. This essay series is intended to help anyone think constructively about the history of technology and its application to our own lives and investments in the future. We’ll never stop making things and using them—and we shouldn’t. But we should do so more wisely and with more attention to context—to entanglements—and perhaps with more selectivity and restraint. As Hodder concludes, we need to be “more homo sapiens and less homo farber.” (“Sapiens” means “wise” and “farber” means “maker.”)
And if you’ve never watched The Good Place, I highly recommend it.
Ian Hodder, Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things (Yale, 2018)—there’s also an audiobook.